


blow me away

by flibbertygigget



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Depression, Gen, Post-Duel, hamiltonprompts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-27
Updated: 2015-12-27
Packaged: 2018-05-09 16:40:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5547647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flibbertygigget/pseuds/flibbertygigget
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After her father dies, Theodosia mourns.</p>
            </blockquote>





	blow me away

**Author's Note:**

> For that hamiltonprompts prompt about Burr dying in the duel instead of Hamilton.

When the letter arrives, Theodosia is calm. She quietly thanks the man who brought it, making every show of that famed Southern hospitality. It is only afterwards that she goes up to thw room rhat she and John share.

Theodosia screams.

\---------------

She wants to go up to New York for the funeral on the fastest ship she can find. John tells her not to. Her health is already somewhat fragile, and even the fastest ship would struggle to get her there in time.

Theodosia reads about her father's funeral in the newspapers. The Jeffersonians hail him as a fallen hero. The Federalists denounce him as a dangerous foe. Theodosia only wants her father back. She takes what vindicative satisfaction she can in the fact that Alexander Hamilton's career is over.

\---------------

Theodosia sits down to write. _Dearest Papa_ , she begins, then she stops. She puts away the paper.

\---------------

Everything her father owned has been sold off to pay his debts. All that remains of him to be shipped to her are three small boxes filled with his correspondence. 

Theodosia is glad, then, that she saved every letter he wrote to her. She is grateful for his files, as meticulous in his personal business as in his public. She slowly begins to piece together the narrative, first of her parents, then of her father's love for her.

She had never responded to his last letter. She hates herself for that.

\---------------

The President comes to visit her, offering his condolences. Theodosia isn't fooled. She remembers how he had thrown her father aside the moment he had obtained his object, remembers how he wouldn't lift a finger to help him even when he was deep in debt and bombarded by Hamilton's barbed words.

She sends him away as quickly as possible. She has no use for false friends.

\---------------

Theodosia knows that John worries about her. She has never been healthy in South Carolina, and now he has to push her to eat more than a few mouthfuls. She knows he fears that she is wasting away.

Theodosia spends all the time she can in the garden. It is one of the few places that she feels like she can breath. She cannot imagine her father here, haunting her with remembered footsteps. He had always been more at home in the city.

Sometimes her son joins her, sitting by her side or playing between the careful rows. She wants to curse him, to make him leave. She wants him to stay. She wants some distraction from the endless regrets and memories.

Sometimes it is too quiet in the garden.

\---------------

_Dearest Papa,_

_I cannot sleep. Why is it that your ghost cannot leave me, not even in my rest?_

_\---------------_

Some nights Theodosia dreams of the duel. On the first shot both men had deloped, neither truly wishing to harm the other. On the second shot Hamilton wasn't so forgiving. The picture plays in her mind's eye over and over, until she wakes up sobbing and screaming for a doctor, for her father, for anyone to come and stop this madness from happening.

Other nights she dreams in memories, memories of times when her father would listen to her read aloud in French, or discuss philosophy with her and her mother, or kiss her gently on her forehead when he thought she was asleep. Those are the nights when she awakens feeling empty, with silent tears streaming down her face. She wishes that they could wash away every memory that tortures her. She wishes she could stop them. She wants to remember.

\---------------

When John tells her that the Hamiltons have come to give their condolences, she asks to meet with them in the garden. She doesn't think she can stand to look at the man who murdered her father otherwise.

Elizabeth Hamilton is a lively, motherly woman who embraces Theodosia as soon as she sees her. It is she who gives all the proper expressions of sympathy with a genuine sadness behind them. Her husband is nearly silent. He glances downward and fiddles with his shirtsleeves.

Theodosia longs for him to look up. She wants to look her father's killer in the eye and express to him one iota of the agony that constantly tears her apart. She wants to tear him apart, to lunge across the table and destroy him as he destroyed her father. She longs to see his blood on her hands and staining her dress.

Instead she quietly expresses her gratitude for their visit and her forgiveness of Hamilton's foul murder. She performs her duty like a monkey, following the script without any emotion or understanding.

Theodosia wishes she was a little less like her father and a little more like his murderer.

\---------------

_Dearest Papa,_

_What can I say to you? That I miss you? That I regret your death? All the words in the world could not describe the abyss your passing has left in my soul._

\---------------

Theodosia hears that Jefferson is running for a second term. When John tells her, he seems to expect a reaction. Instead she simply nods and turns the conversation to safer subjects. She is too used to sorrow and rage to allow them to peek through the mask and frighten her husband.

Later that day, she cloisters herself in their room, claiming a headache, and embarks on a most foolhardy enterprise. Her father would have warned her against her plan. He would have urged patience. Theodosia is done with waiting. She sits down and writes a letter.

_General Hamilton,_

_You are as aware as I of our differences in the past, but I write to you as a desperate woman. Thomas Jefferson The man who abandoned my father in his house of need, is running for a second term, and it is considered likely that he will obtain it. You have, I know, a similar opinion of our dear President, so I beg your assistance. I shall do all I can to help you to obtain the goal I most desire: the utter destruction of Jefferson and his reelection campaign._

_I remain_

_Your obt. srvnt._

_Theodosia Burr Alston_

\---------------

Jefferson runs a good campaign, but the last minute defection of New York dips him below the required number of electoral votes. Once again the vote goes to the House of Representatives. Theodosia travels to the capital and creates quite a stir when she and Hamilton make their alliance common knowledge. 

Together they craft arguments against him, united in purpose but not in motive. Hamilton seeks to reignite his former popularity and bolster his faltering Federalists. Theodosia simply seeks revenge.

"Would you do it again?" she asks him one late night as they review the reaction to their latest pamphlet.

"Do what?" he says.

"Support Jefferson, slander my father, and murder him," Theodosia says. "Do you have an ounce of regret for any of it?" Hamilton leans back in his chair and pinches the bridge of his nose.

"Mrs. Alston, were it in my power to take back that bullet, I would," he said, "but I cannot regret any words I spoke against Burr. No matter what pain it may have brought you, I am incapable of equivocating on my opinion, and my opinion on the subject of your father is unchanged."

"In that case, you will forgive me for not pardoning you," Theodosia says, "for I find that my own opinion seems to been more shiftless even than yours. I am not in the habit, General Hamilton, of shooting a friend over political differences."

"I will remind you, Mrs. Alston, that your father was the one to issue the challenge."

"That may be true, but whose aim proved more deadly?" Hamilton bows his head in acquiescence. 

"As I have said, I regret the madness, though not the method leading up to it."

"He deloped on the first shot, what made you think he would not continue that course with the second?"

"To have a second shot at all had to mean-" Theodosia slams both palms on the table, overturning an inkwell. In spite her resolve not to show this man the depths of what he had wrought, sbe can feel the tears spilling onto her cheeks.

"General Hamilton, this conversation is over," she says. "No matter your excuses and justifications, I believe in a God that will cause you to experience justice when you have followed my father. If you find mercy from Him, so be it, but you will not receive it from me, never from me. You have taken enough from me as it is."

"Mrs. Alston, I always saw your father as a friend." She fixes him with an icy glare.

"A friend would not have slandered him so. A friend would have known that he was not the type of man to change course halfway through an action. You were no friend of my father's, Hamilton, and nothing you say can induce me to think of you as anything but my enemy."

Theodosia does not slam the door as she leaves. Her father taught her better than that.

\---------------

_ Dearest Papa, _

_ I'm sorry. _

\---------------

Jefferson is reelected. Hamilton's career, boosted by his frantic resistance to Jefferson, slowly begins to repair itself. Theodosia returns to South Carolina. Years pass.

Most days she can barely get out of bed. She cannot bear company, and solitude is almost worse. The rumors reach her: the ruined daughter of Aaron Burr, too weak to recover from her father's passing. She takes to sitting in the back corner of the nearest cafe, reading and rereading that last letter from her father.

Over time the name of Aaron Burr fades from the public memory. Hamilton is more popular than ever, and the embarrassing incident is swept under the table like all other refuse, out of the sight of polite company. Her father is reduced to a petty politician honorably slain by the great Sir Hamilton as history marches on in its quest to destroy the past.

Theodosia wants to break. She wants her hell to end. More than anything, she wants the world to see her father as the man that he was, not as the devil that they want him to be. It takes her a long time, too long, to realize what she must do.

History is intent of obliterating her father and painting instead a caricature of Aaron Burr's mistakes. She is the only one left who is able to protect his legacy. She takes out the boxes of her father's correspondence, both public and private, and begins to compose her masterpiece. She will make sure that the world knows the truth of Aaron Burr. She will tell his story now that he is gone.

She can only hope that it will be enough.


End file.
